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Comfort Woman Statue – After all insult and aggression

Everybody would know by now what happened in Busan, South Korea. Another comfort woman statue was erected right in front of the Japanese Consulate by Korean activists despite the governmental agreement to settle this matter and move on and despite the fact that the majority of former comfort women supported the agreement and already received compensation. Japan has made efforts to settle the matter many times in the past. Whoever is in power in the Korean government each time made promises that they would never bring the matter up again only to break the promise over and over again.

Whatever justifications are given by those Korean activists and the South Korean Government, the reality is that the statue is always followed by insults and aggression towards Japanese.

It is not peaceful commemoration. The South Korean Government does not bother with its obligations under the governmental agreement and they are even asking the Japanese Government to resolve the matter with the activists directly rather than enforce their own laws. We are still surprised that they are breaching the agreement after receiving the reparation money and giving it to most of the former comfort women.

Their aggression does not stop here. Lee Jaemyung, mayor of a city near Seoul called Seongnam who is nicknamed as Korean Trump is accusing President Pak of spying for Japan and publicly stating that he considers Japan is a military foe. We know that he came all the way to Sydney for the unveiling ceremony of the comfort woman statue now sitting in the car park of the Uniting Church and accused the Japanese Emperor of being a “War Criminal”.

Mr Lee Jae-myung in Sydney considers Japan as South Korea’s immediate Military Foe.

Enough is enough. We don’t want this kind of thing imported into our local community in Australia. It is known that those activists in Sydney and Busan are controlled by Chon Dea Hyup which is officially recognized by the South Korean Government as a North Korean connected agency. Their purpose is to break the governmental agreement and cause animosity as much as possible and so they don't listen to our concerns.

We are concerned about the extremely offensive behaviours always associated with the statue. We firmly believe that all migrants should accept Australian values once they decide to migrate here and that includes living in harmony with people from other countries, even countries who were once at war.

This is absolutely not a peaceful commemoration of all the women who suffered in war as well as women suffering from domestic violence as Rev Crews insists. As shown in Busan, the comfort woman statues have a political purpose, and they foment antiJapanese sentiment amongst local Korean communities with a very negative impact on us.

Meanwhile AJCN received a threatening email from a person living in South Korea who wants to kill us in the most cruel way and see us dying begging for life. We are reporting this matter to police.

Andrew Bolt’s article about AJCN

Articles in the Sun Herald (December 15, 2016/ Title: Now Japanese use our race law against a war memorial) and The Australian newspapers (December 19,2016 / Title: ’Comfort Women’ row shows absurdity of 18C) which attack the section 18C complaint brought by AJCN, miss the point. This has nothing to do with the great monuments to peace and remembrance of Australia's war dead, which Australian war memorials are. It has nothing to do with debates between Koreans and Japanese about their wartime history.

Japanese Australians are feeling intimidated and humiliated by the display of the comfort women statue, as it singles Japanese out as perpetrators of shameful conduct towards women in wartime, of all the peoples who call Australia home. This has been done deliberately. We know this from the wording of the plaque accompanying the statue and the public statements made by Rev Crews before the media spotlight has fallen on the case. He said he did it to make "the perpetrators" - being the Japanese – apologise in a video posted over the internet in April. He also said he did it out of a sense of outrage about the decision of Strathfield Council not to permit the exhibition of the statue at the public place, on similar grounds to our present complaint. The statue was never exhibited in a good faith.

Naturally Japanese in Australia are offended and insulted by being singled out, alone amongst the people of the world, as perpetrators of sexual violence towards women during wartime.

We have been expressing our concerns to the Uniting Church since June. Rev Crews now says the statue is to help us all contemplate the lamentable scourge of sexual violence towards women in all wars, and even those women suffering domestic violence in today’s society. So we have said to Rev Crews of the Uniting Church - make the message universal on the accompanying plaque, to match your own words as to what you say it commemorates. In its present form, it is causing fear in Japanese people based on their race.

We think the Uniting Church did not realise how comfort women statues abroad have been used as focal points for the racial abuse of Japanese people today, or to educate young people to hate Japanese people although we explained with many examples of those cases really happening. We are very aware of that and we are doing everything we can to stop such practices being imported here. This past experience naturally makes us wary about the true motivations of those who imported the statue to Australia, and vigilant to protect ourselves from similar abuse here.

We have great hopes for the conciliation process at the HRC that the leadership of the Uniting Church will work with us to find a compromise. Let us all remember the female victims of war; there is no need to treat us Japanese living in Australia differently as we do so.